How will CCU football chart a winning path? What to know before Coastal’s season starts

During the 2024 college football season, Coastal Carolina University’s football team will write one of the most interesting chapters in its burgeoning story.

CCU has a simple question to answer after an 8-5 campaign filled with ups and downs in 2023. Will they maintain their winning ways under second-year Head Coach Tim Beck with the pressure of an inaugural season now removed?

It will be up to Beck and his team to answer that question and chart a winning path. The second-year coach said his roster is ready to begin that journey. Fall camp was physical, and the high-intensity practices sometimes led that ferocity to boil over, Beck acknowledged.

“Quite a few times,” he said. “It’s to be expected.”

Despite this, CCU will soon get a chance to turn that high intensity on its first match-up with Jacksonville State Aug. 28, 2024. Here are three factors that will impact CCU’s fortunes this season.

What is Coastal’s game plan on offense in 2024?

While Beck declined to announce his starting quarterback against Jacksonville State, CCU’s philosophy for scoring points is rather straightforward this season. Indeed, Offensive Coordinator Travis Trickett did not mince words when asked what Coastal Carolina will do to win games in 2024. The Chants will run the ball.

“We’re going to continue to establish the run game,” he said. If you look at the Sun Belt champions for the last 10 years, they all finished in the league rushing no worse than fourth.”

That ground-and-pound attitude will paired with a Top 40 passing game in the NCAA in 2023. CCU accrued those yards through the air with a mix of short throws generating yards after catch and deep shots built into much of Trickett’s offense.

He declined to give specifics about how his passing game will be the same or different this year, adding that Coastal will take what the opponent’s defense gives them. Despite the familiar refrain, this year, this season has an advantage that the Chants lacked in 2023.

For Beck and Trickett, this season will be the first with their fully implemented offensive vision. In 2023, the pair had to balance phasing in their new air raid and power spread offense while retaining some of former Head Coach Jamey Chadwell’s spread option concepts.

Combining philosophies caused some issues at the start of 2023 as players tried to learn the new offense. Addressing those concerns involved Beck intervening in the offense, who typically refrains from micro-managing his team.

“I helped,” Beck said.” “There were times I needed to lend my experience in that room in different ways. Some might be talking to the quarterback. Some might be narrowing a game plan. Some might be how we’re going to practice …There were different things.”

Two areas Coastal addressed mid-season were the offensive line and the running game. Offensive Line Coach Derek Warehime said the unit also changed blocking schemes for 2023, but fully adopting it proved difficult initially.

“It took a little bit for the guys to learn the system. As the season went on, they understood the system a little bit more of what we were wanting,” Warehime said. “Now they’ve got a complete understanding of what we’re what we’re asking for within the system.”

In CCU’s first five games of 2023, opponents sacked former starting quarterback Grayson McCall 10 times. However, during the season’s final eight games, CCU only surrendered seven sacks. Warehime added that Coastal’s offensive line faced blitzes on 75 percent of pass plays in 2023.

Running the ball also proved challenging at times during the season. In Coastal’s first five games of 2023, Chant running backs averaged more than 4.1 yards per carry. However, in the final eight games of 2023, CCU rushed for more than 4.4 yards per carry, finishing the year ranked seventh on the ground. By Trickett’s own design, CCU’s success will rest on having a more consistent running game this year.

CCU’s roster has changed significantly this year. Is it a cause for concern?

Part of that will include relying on players who just arrived at Coastal Carolina via the transfer portal. The roster underwent massive upheaval for the second year in a row as the Chants lost talent to the portal, graduation and the NFL.

Coastal coaches have spoken frequently about how college football’s changing landscape makes maintaining roster cohesion much more complex, adding several unknowns to how their teams will perform on the field.

However, despite many of the new faces Coastal will rely on this, CCU has experienced players at almost every position group on offense and defense before this season starts.

The position group that serves as one of the greatest unknowns aside from the quarterback is the defensive line, with Will Whitson being one of the few returning players from 2023. Defensive Coordinator Craig Naivar said while the defensive line might have less experience as a group, it is probably stronger.

“I think we’ll be deeper as a group than we were a year ago,” Naivar said.

Indeed, Beck seemed confident that his core fits his vision for the roster, despite the normal anxieties of whether their practice performance will translate to game time.

“There’s a lot of guys that saw action this year or even two years ago, just a little bit here and there. So there’s a good mix to it,” Beck said. “I feel good about that.”

Red Zone Offense and special teams. Here’s how CCU addressed concerns from 2023

Despite finishing 8-5 in 2023, the Chants had several winnable games slip away due to several recurring factors. The red zone offense struggled at times, as CCU occasionally marched down the field only to stall out at the precipice of the goal line. Compounding those problems, field goal kicking cost CCU points in several games, and the Chants barely avoided disaster after several almost botched punt returns.

Beck said that, following the 2023 season, a lack of execution regarding the little details caused much of Coastal’s struggles. In year two, Beck and Trickett believe they have addressed those concerns. Trickett said they’ve tried to address red zone offense to ensure better execution this year.

“There were just moments where we didn’t execute that we should have executed,” Trickett said. “That was a statistic for me that was a pain in my ass the entire year. That was costing us.”

CCU also recruited wide receiver Tray Taylor, who could factor into Coastal’s pass game and special teams. Beck added that players competed for both the kicker and long snapper positions.

“We definitely have addressed some of the special teams. I think recruiting has been really good,” Beck said. “I feel like just the kicking element itself has been elevated, besides the fact that we have depth.”

When asked if improvements from 2023 would be visible for Coastal fans to spot this year, Trickett said no. The only thing that mattered was getting the ball in the end zone.

In 2024, Beck will guide his team through his second season, devoid of some of the growing pains many coaches face in their first year. While Beck refrained from setting goals, he said winning would signify the team’s progress.

“I haven’t really thought about what is my goal for this season, other than winning the conference,” he added.

Indeed, Coastal’s match-up against Jacksonville State will serve as the first of many data points comparing this season to 2023 to determine whether the team has improved in 2024.